A Robeson Filmography / Singer-actor struggled for dignified roles

Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, April 5, 1998

Had he only been born 30 years later, Paul Robeson might have realized his potential as a screen actor and not been relegated to field hands and "poor old Joe" parts -- demeaning stereotypes that violated the dignity and sophistication that were so essential to his personality.

In the late '50s, Sidney Poitier became the first black movie star -- and the first to play the multidimensional roles denied Robeson. Keenly aware of his place in cultural history, Poitier has lamented that Robeson and his contemporaries -- Louise Beavers, Butterfly McQueen, Hattie McDaniel, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson and Stepin Fetchit -- were saddled with demeaning "minority roles."

"They were appendages to the other actors, the white actors," Poitier said. "They were there almost as scenery. To have them as full-blooded individuals with the ability to think through their own problems and to chart their own course -- American films were not into that. Difficult as it is today, it is nowhere near as impossible as it was for Robeson."

In 1930, a decade before he finally turned his back on commercial filmmaking, Robeson said, "It is one of my ambitions to make a talkie which will interpret fully the spirit of the Negro race." That goal went unrealized, but Robeson, who saw his African roots as "greater in tradition and culture than the American race," kept trying.

"He was so far ahead of his time," Robeson's granddaughter Susan Robeson says. "Decades and decades ahead of his time. . . . His films never realized themselves because he was just so much beyond what they were."

It was only when Robeson played Othello onstage, she says, that her grandfather found "material that was worthy of him. . . . That was his crowning interpretation as an artist."

A list of Robeson's films follows. Each is available on video, with the exception of "Borderline," which plays with "Body and Soul" and "Big Fella" at 6:30 p.m. Thursday -- the 100th anniversary of Robeson's birth -- at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

--"Body and Soul" (1925): Robeson's screen debut, directed by pioneer black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, features the actor in two roles: a womanizing thief posing as a pastor in a Southern town, and the pastor's straight-ahead brother.

--"Borderline" (1930): Robeson's second film was an experimental silent, made in Switzerland by a British artist's collective: director Kenneth McPherson, his wife, Winifred Ellerman, and their lover Hilda Doolittle, the poet known as H.D. Robeson plays Pete, a black man in a Swiss border town and his wife, Eslanda, plays his girlfriend, Adah.

Eslanda, whose artistic ambitions were always overshadowed by her husband, called the film "one of those very advanced expressionistic things in the Russian-German manner. . . . It's a dreadful highbrow, but beautifully done."

--"The Emperor Jones" (1933): Robeson's first sound film is based on the Eugene O'Neill play about a runaway Pullman porter who becomes the emperor of a Caribbean island. DuBose Heyward, author of "Porgy and Bess," adapted O'Neill's play.

--"Sanders of the River" (1935): The opportunity to play Bosambo, an African leader, appealed greatly to Robeson's passion for African culture and his desire to dignify black Americans by demonstrating the richness of their cultural roots. British producer Alexander Korda dispatched a 15-man crew to shoot documentary footage in the African heartland, but betrayed Robeson by turning Bosambo into a docile servant.

--"Song of Freedom" (1936): Robeson plays John Zinga, a London dockworker who becomes an international concert singer and travels to Africa when he discovers his royal lineage there. In his homeland, Zinga is met with scorn until he bursts into reverberating song. Robeson, stung by the disappointment of "Sanders of the River," demanded and won final-cut approval. In later years, he named "Song of Freedom" and "Proud Valley" as the films he was most pleased with.

--"Show Boat" (1936): In his best-known film, Robeson sings the ballad that became his musical signature, "Ol' Man River," written for him by Jerome Kern. James Whale directed, and the amazing cast includes Helen Morgan as the mulatto Julie, Irene Dunne as the female lead and actors McDaniel, Anderson and Clarence Muse.

--"Jericho" (also known as "Dark Sands") (1937): Robeson plays Jericho Jackson, a falsely accused soldier who escapes an unjust court-martial, flees to North Africa and becomes leader of a native tribe. Exteriors were filmed in Egypt. "Out of respect to Paul Robeson and his magnificent baritone voice," the New York Times wrote, "the less said about 'Dark Sands' the better."

--"Big Fella" (1937): Rarely seen in the United States, this British musical, based on the 1929 novel "Banjo," stars Robeson as a Marseilles dockworker who befriends a lost white boy. According to Robeson biographer Martin Duberman, the star wanted to make "a racial statement about an ordinary but admirable black man functioning well in a contemporary, European setting." Eslanda plays the minor role of a cafe proprietor, and Robeson sings several songs.

--"King Solomon's Mines" (1937): Based on H. Rider Haggard's classic adventure novel, this lavish production had Robeson playing Umbopa, a white man's servant who reveals his true identity as an African chief and saves his treasure-seeking British friends. The film was remade in 1950 with Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr and in 1985 with Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone.

--"Proud Valley" (1940): Robeson's favorite, which finds him playing David Goliath, an American who goes to work in a Welsh coal mine and joins the struggle for workers' rights. The character was based on the true story of a black miner from West Virginia who traveled to England.

Robeson had a strong kinship with the Welsh, going back to early concert tours of the British Isles. "The Welsh are a struggling people with music in their souls," his granddaughter Susan Robeson wrote in "The Whole World in His Hands: A Pictorial Biography of Paul Robeson." "They felt a deep bond with the sufferings and hopes expressed in the spirituals Paul sang."

--"Tales of Manhattan" (1942): Robeson had already turned his back on Hollywood in 1939 but made this last film, an O. Henry-style comedy told in five vignettes about the effect a dress coat has on its various owners. Henry Fonda, Rita Hayworth and Edward G. Robinson were among the all-star cast, and Robeson played a sharecropper who gets a windfall when the coat, stuffed with money, drops from an airplane.

The black press hated it, demonstrators picketed its Los Angeles premiere, and Robeson complained that his character was turned into a "plantation hallelujah shouter. . . . This is very offensive to my people." Fed up at last, Robeson called a news conference and announced his retirement.

--"Native Land" (1942): Five years in the making and released shortly after Robeson announced his retirement from Hollywood, this independent combines documentary footage with staged re-enactments of U.S. civil liberties violations. Produced by a collective of left-wing artists known as Frontier Films, it was labeled "obviously a Communist project" by the FBI. Robeson doesn't appear but sings and narrates.

FILMS ABOUT ROBESON

--"Paul Robeson: The Tallest Tree in Our Forest" (1977): The craft is poor, the narration stiff and the structure rigidly chronological in this documentary, but it's not bad for rudimentary information on Robeson and his careers as scholar, athlete, linguist, actor-singer and political firebrand.

--"Paul Robeson" (1978): A filmed play, written by Philip Hayes Dean, that stars James Earl Jones as Robeson. Jones does his best, but the play's format, which has him remembering his life in sequence and speaking to the audience, grows awfully tedious. Lloyd Richards ("Fences") directed.

--"Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist" (1979): Poitier, who wanted to make a film of Robeson's life, narrates this short Oscar-winning documentary. It's a quick recap of Robeson's politics and singing and acting careers -- and a lament for the achievements that were "nearly obliterated, blotted out by the fears and political anxieties that gripped America in the early '50s."